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    XO
    XO
    XO
    Ebook144 pages2 hours

    XO

    By Sara Rauch

    ()

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    About this ebook

    Sara Rauch is in a long-term, committed relationship with another woman when she begins a low-residency MFA in fiction. Though it goes against the promises she's made, she finds herself pulled into an intense affair with a married man, a well-known writer in the program. More than an essay about bisexual infidelity and the resulting heartbreaks,

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherAutofocus Books
    Release dateApr 5, 2022
    ISBN9781957392035
    XO

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      Book preview

      XO - Sara Rauch

      XO

      Sara Rauch

      autofocus books

      Orlando, Florida

      ©Sara Rauch, 2022

      All rights reserved.

      Published by Autofocus Books

      PO Box 560002

      Orlando, Fl 32856

      autofocuslit.com

      Essay/Memoir

      ISBN: 978-1-957392-03-5

      Cover Illustrations ©Amy Wheaton

      Library of Congress Control Number: 2022933722

      for you

      "the faithfulness I can imagine would be a weed

      flowering in tar, a blue energy piercing

      the massed atoms of a bedrock disbelief."

      — When We Dead Awaken, Adrienne Rich

      XO

      —Part One—

      "Damsel, I say

      unto thee, arise!"

      Not long ago, I witnessed the death of my beloved cat after eighteen years of companionship. I was kneeling next to him, my hands on his head and chest, as he took his final breaths. They were a struggle. Cancer had metastasized to his lungs; I suspect that as his body shut down, they were filling with fluid and he was drowning. His final breath whistled as through a wooden flute.

      Still, I had a hard time discerning whether he was truly gone. Did his whiskers just twitch? I lifted him from his place at the foot of the stairs and carried his body into the kitchen. His mouth dripped liquid—was he drooling? Perhaps I was in shock. The rational part of me arranged his form on a large strip of muslin. While I wrapped him, another part of me entertained the thought that he might at any moment breathe and rise again, head to the cabinet and beg for a snack.

      I was raised Catholic. Resurrection is the faith’s central miracle—a human returns from the inevitable, unscathed. The word comes from the Latin noun resurrectio-onis, literally a straightening from under again. Which came first: burying the dead or their ability to rise? Many of the cultures that prefer cremation (Hinduism, Buddhism) also believe in the possibility of return, usually in the form of reincarnation. A subtle difference: a new flesh, animated by the same spirit.

      The concept of resurrection has always appealed to me: a shedding, a fresh start, a bridge between old and new. The body is wasted, the body revivifies. A moment ends, another begins.

      Not long after my cat’s death, I had a rare afternoon to myself. It was a summer Friday, and my parents had the kids. Work completed, I decided to read in the backyard. Out I went, Karen Maezen Miller’s Paradise in Plain Sight tucked under my arm, bowl of potato chips in hand, to the Adirondack chairs parked beneath a flowering dogwood. From this spot, I noticed that the birdfeeder post at the base of an enormous oak had been knocked down. The wind, I figured. We live on the side of a mountain and the gusts can be ferocious.

      I left the fenced backyard, gathered the fallen feeders, and attempted to straighten the metal base of the stand. No luck. Large chunks of bark lay scattered on the mossy grass at my bare feet. I caught a whiff of something ripe, gamey, and realized that a bear must have ambled through and caused the damage.

      Settled back into my chair, book in hand, a strange sensation crept over me. Why was it so quiet? Our backyard teems with animals, a symphony of chirps, squeaks, tweets, shaking branches, and piercing whistles. I glanced over my shoulder at the other set of birdfeeders, but they were empty, even of squirrels. I looked back across the yard to the bent post, and then, for some reason, up. There, in a crook where the huge oak splits into two trunks, about fifteen feet high, was a black bear. A juvenile, but without a doubt strong and fast. The bear shifted in its perch, eyes glued to me.

      Without thinking, I left the book and bowl of chips and walked—eyes on the bear for as long as I could keep it in view—inside. From an upstairs bedroom window, my husband and I watched the bear descend, sniff around the ground where his treat had been, then disappear into the row of arborvitaes along our yard’s southern edge.

      Was it a sign? And if so, of what? Was it my cat letting me know he made the crossing? Was it my past checking in on me? Was it a reminder toward strength? Or was it just a hungry young bear helping itself to the strange spoils of this world?

      I don’t have any answers. But I have a story.

      Once upon a time, I fell in love with another woman and set out to build a life with her. Once upon a time, I fell in love with a married man and struck bliss. And yet, despite these magical beginnings, neither tale ended happily ever after. But that’s not the point of my story. Fairy tales—Grimm, Disney, or otherwise—never made a whole lot of sense to me. Myths, on the other hand, I get. "A myth was never intended as an accurate account of a historical event; it was something that had in some sense happened once but that also happens all the time," Karen Armstrong wrote in The Case for God. A myth can be a sort of map, a guide through psychic terrain.

      In pre-modern times, mappa mundi were popular. These maps were less concerned with capturing specific geographical representation and more concerned with presenting the world as it appeared to the map’s makers, spiritual landmarks (such as the Garden of Eden) included. The world was still a place of divine mystery, even in the face of increasing scientific discovery. Many of these maps placed Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden somewhere along the edges of the known world. The best known mappa mundi, a mammoth three-and-a-half meters square, was rendered on goat skin by the nuns of Ebstorf; on it, Jesus’s head appears at what we would typically call North while his feet protrude at South—in effect, his body bears the entire world.  

      The narrative I am about to weave is, in a way, a mappa mundi. It is a map of lands and stories, accurate only in the sense that it embodies a world where I once lived. So much of memory is fractal. I must choose where we begin and end. I choose, too, the threads to weave. And thus this story is spun, like the spider’s web, as an act of instinct and devotion. Some spiders spin orbs or funnels, others spin tangles or meshes. Some webs appear orderly, others less so.

      Webs are not permanent fixtures, and neither are maps. A web is woven not once, but many times, the pattern similar but never the same. Maps are drawn and redrawn as beliefs alter, as alliances and borders shift, as rivers change course, as cities and coasts rise and fall. What was marked with an X today may be washed away tomorrow.

      Idyll

      Two months after meeting her at a dinner party, on the crest of a month of late nights and breathless declarations, I flew to Paris to vacation with a woman. She wasn’t the first woman, but she was the first for whom I’d crossed time zones, entering an unfamiliar land where I did not speak the language, entrusting my experience to a near stranger. This was the kind of love I had been seeking: revelatory, spontaneous. On the long flight, through the pit stop in Amsterdam, I imagined finding myself home in her arms. For the sake of our story, I’ll call her Piper.

      Piper had landed in Paris a few days before me. She was on a short sabbatical from her job teaching high school French, staying in a rented studio apartment in a central arrondissement where I would also spend the next few days.

      When I landed at de Gaulle, I was jet-lagged and disoriented, and she hadn’t yet arrived at the exit terminal where we planned to meet. I wondered, while biding my time in the bathroom, if I’d made a mistake. I barely knew her. What would I do if she neglected to appear? My French was beginner at best, comprised mostly of easy greetings and a long list of produce I’d picked up over years of editing foreign cookbooks. This was pre-smartphone, before pervasive Wifi. We had no way of reaching each other without an internet connection, no backup plan. I did not even know the address of the apartment. But I had a credit card in my wallet, and I’d traveled alone before—I reasoned I’d find a hotel and figure something out if she didn’t show.

      But when I emerged from les toilettes, she stood there in her Diesel jeans and scuffed grey-brown boots, smiling and sexy, a calla lily gripped in her hand. She hugged me, kissed me, briefly. City of Love and all that, she explained, but they’re still somewhat conservative.

      I’d just flown across an ocean to be with her, and this unexpected expression of restraint bewildered me. But relieved by her presence, I let her lead. I just wanted to be near her woodsy, magnetic scent, her apricot-soft skin, her dexterous tongue maneuvering the slippery language. She guided me out of the airport where we boarded a bus to the city.

      She showed me everything. Over the few days I could afford to take off from work, we crammed in the Eiffel Tower, Les Invalides, the Pigalle, Notre-Dame, a boat tour down the Seine. She toured me around her old student haunts—little changed from her grad school days, she said—ordered me escargot and Monaco, watched as I wandered through Shakespeare & Co. We bought bags of garishly red candy lips and stayed up late in the studio apartment, talking, eating, playing. By the last night, I felt overfull: baguette, crepe, raspberry galette, Livarot; Kir and deliciously inexpensive red wine to wash it all down. As I packed my suitcase, I lamented the ring I’d wanted to buy in the Latin Quarter, a thick silver band studded with eight square lab rubies.

      You really loved it? Piper asked, watching me fold and roll my shirts.

      I did, I said. It was probably worth the ten euros that woman tacked on to the price.

      Piper laughed. That woman thought she could pull one over on you because you are américaine.

      I wished I hadn’t been so willful in walking away from what I had truly wanted.

      The next morning, during my exit interview, the man at customs asked my reason for visiting, and I told him pleasure. He laughed and said in his charming accent, Only Americans vacation for so few days. I smiled weakly. It’s true that Americans are notoriously stingy with the time they give over to pure enjoyment, but I was also anxious

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